Sharky’s Machine (1981) Review

A narcotics officer blows an operation in public, is demoted to vice, and is given four people nobody else wants. They start watching a high-priced call girl because she is the only thread anybody has, and the watching becomes the film.

The 7 is for a picture with three good ideas and a fourth act that abandons two of them. The surveillance material is superb, the score is one of the best in any American film of the period, and the last thirty minutes become a conventional pursuit.

It is also considerably more violent than its reputation, including a torture sequence that was cut in several territories and is still difficult to sit through.

The Surveillance Is the Film

The middle hour is four police officers in an empty apartment across the street from a woman they are recording, and the film understands what that does to people.

The structure is precise. Shifts, equipment, boredom, a whiteboard, and four men who have nothing to do but listen to somebody else’s life for weeks. Sharky falls for her, which is the obvious development, and the film is more interested in the mechanism than the romance.

The equipment is also specific enough to be credible. Reel-to-reel recorders, a telephone tap that has to be physically installed, a camera with a long lens on a tripod, and the film spends time on the tedium of maintaining all of it across a rotation of shifts.

What makes it work is that he never meets her during this stretch. Everything he knows is a recording, a photograph and a window, and the picture is clear that what he has fallen for is an assembled version of somebody.

The photographs are the clearest version of that. He has a wall of them, taken at distance, and the film shows him looking at images of a woman doing ordinary things while listening to a recording of her doing something else entirely.

Rachel Ward has the harder half of that structure. Dominoe has to be watchable through a window for an hour, with almost no dialogue directed at anybody, and then become a person when the film finally lets them meet.

The Conversation is the film this material is standing next to and it is not embarrassed. This is not as good and it is working on the same idea, which is that listening to somebody is a way of inventing them.

The Score

The soundtrack is assembled from existing jazz and blues recordings and it is used more intelligently than almost any original score of the period.

The approach is diegetic wherever possible. Music is coming from a radio, a club, an apartment, a car, and the film repeatedly places the source in the scene instead of laying a cue over it.

That produces the film’s best effect. During the surveillance stretch, the music Sharky hears is the music she is playing, which means the score is part of what he is falling for.

There is also a long stretch where the surveillance team argues about the music itself, which is the film at its most relaxed and its most convincing. Four men in an empty apartment with nothing to do developing opinions about somebody else’s record collection.

Randy Crawford, Doc Severinsen, Chet Baker, Sarah Vaughan and Julie London are all on it, and the selection is not decorative. Each cue belongs to a specific room in the film, and a track recurring is how the film tells the audience which of the film’s several rooms they have just been put back inside without a word of dialogue.

Reynolds reportedly fought for the soundtrack and paid for a considerable amount of it, and the decision is the clearest evidence that he understood what he was making. A conventional orchestral score would have removed the film’s entire texture.

Atlanta

The film is set in a specific city at a specific moment and it is one of very few American crime pictures to use Atlanta as somewhere and not as a location.

The geography is political. A downtown of new towers, a vice district a few blocks away, and a mayoral campaign running through the whole plot, and the film is explicit that the three are connected.

The film is specific about which blocks. Peachtree, the Omni, a stretch of massage parlours and bars, and a mayoral candidate whose campaign office and whose money are in the same few square miles as the business he is promising to clean up.

That connection is the plot. The candidate, the money, the woman and the police department are one system, and the investigation is obstructed not by a conspiracy but by the ordinary operation of people protecting an arrangement.

Henry Silva plays the enforcer and it is the most frightening performance in the picture. Billy Score is a user, entirely unpredictable, and the one character with no interest in the arrangement everybody else is protecting.

The final sequence takes place in one of those towers, which is the correct place for it. A film about a city’s new money resolving itself at the top of the tallest building in it is doing the work without a line of dialogue.

The fall from that building is also the film’s most discussed stunt, performed by Dar Robinson from over two hundred feet onto an airbag, and it is filmed in a single unbroken shot from the top instead of cut into pieces.

Reynolds Directing

He made five films as a director and this is the only one anybody should seek out, and the difference is that he is not the whole subject of it.

The performance is also restrained by his standards. Sharky is quiet, tired, physically diminished after the opening, and Reynolds plays down the charm that was his entire commercial value at the time.

The opening sequence establishes the demotion physically. He is in a foot chase, makes a decision that goes wrong in public, and the film puts him in vice within ten minutes without anybody delivering a speech about his career.

What he is good at behind the camera is staging and pace. The surveillance sequences have rhythm, the violence arrives without warning, and the film cuts away from its own set pieces earlier than a studio picture would.

Where he is less secure is tone. There are comic beats in the squad room that belong to a different film, and they arrive between sequences of genuine unpleasantness without any transition.

The squad itself is well cast around him. Brian Keith, Charles Durning, Richard Libertini and Bernie Casey are four character actors given a room and time in it, and the boredom between them reads as men who have worked together for years.

The Torture Sequence

Sharky is taken, restrained and mutilated, and the sequence is long, specific and filmed without any relieving cuts.

It is the moment the film declares what it is. Up to that point the picture could be read as a stylish thriller, and afterward it cannot, and the second half is a man operating with an injury the film never lets the audience forget.

The consequence is carried through, which is the reason to respect it. He is permanently damaged, the damage affects what he can do, and the film does not restore him for the finale.

The final confrontation is built around that limitation. He cannot use one hand properly, the film has established it for forty minutes, and the staging of the last fight is organized entirely around what a man with that injury can and cannot physically do.

Whether the sequence is necessary is a genuine question. The argument for it is that the injury has to be real for the ending to mean anything, and the argument against is that the film could have established the same fact in a third of the running time.

Reynolds also performed a considerable amount of his own physical work here and had been genuinely injured on a previous production, which is context instead of justification and does explain the specificity of how the aftermath is played.

Should you watch Sharky’s Machine?

Yes, and it is badly underseen. A surveillance structure that understands listening as a way of inventing somebody, a diegetic jazz score doing work no orchestral cue could, one city used as a political argument, and a torture sequence the film is honest enough to carry.

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